The Intuitive Customer - Helping You Improve Your Customer Experience To Gain Growth

The metaverse. It is supposed to be a digital world. Some say it will combine social media and virtual reality (VR), like a more complex VR chat. Some say it will be the next level of online interaction where anything can happen. Others are confused by what it is and what it means. Some call it Mark Zuckerberg's pipe dream. We think it is the future of Customer Experiences.   Immersive experiences...

Customer satisfaction is low. What's worse, we can't just blame COVID for the problem. Sure, COVID is part of it, but, surprisingly, this problem has other causes.   Not only that, but a recent report from the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) suggests that only 30 percent of companies tracked by ACSI improved their score—since 2011. That means that 70 percent of companies either had fla...

What would it be like if your printer sent you an email to let you know it needed ink? Or if your car could tell you that you need to take it in for transmission service? Or if your refrigerator could tell the repair professional what was wrong with it before you ever said a word?   Sound like a futuristic take on product technology? It is, and it's called the Internet of Things (IoT). However, yo...

We all know that feeling when you see which client is calling and you inwardly groan,   What is wrong now? Some customer relationships are more difficult than others, for sure. That is to be expected in any organization.   However, there are other customer relationships that have moved beyond difficult. The costs of the resources it takes to manage the many aspects of doing business with them has...

Our listeners have problems and they let us know about it. For our I'm in a Pickle feature on the podcast, Tina in New Zealand wrote to us because the engineering firm she works with   thinks customer relationships are a waste of time. She wants to know how to convince the engineers that customer relationships are what get the customer strategy gears turning toward long-term success.   I found thi...

Did you know that customer satisfaction scores are the lowest they have been in the past 15 years? It's true, and you can't blame it all on COVID, although there is some blame to be cast there. Per the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), only 30 percent of companies tracked by ASCI improved their score; that means 70 percent didn't, and that's alarming. It's also one of seven significant...

When I was 25, my mum was proud of the fact that we had never discussed the verity of Father Christmas, which, of course, is not in question. She wanted that story to be a part of my life, so she made sure it was, well into adulthood.   I have continued the tradition with my kids. Father Christmas, the story of a toymaker that brings love and joy to children all around the world has been in effect...

Imagine that you own a well-known car brand during a global pandemic. No one is coming to the show room to see your dealer's cars, nor are they bringing them in for service. No one is really driving them around, either. What do you do? For Nissan's Hussein Dajani , General Manager, Digital and CX Transformation, this wasn't hard to imagine since he lived it for the past 18 months. He and his Custo...

Fernando has a problem that he wants our help solving. In his industry of branding and packaging fast-moving consumer goods, his clients often tell him to do whatever the competition is doing. However, Fernando knows that while imitation is the highest form of flattery, it's a less than ideal customer strategy when you want to win customers from the competition.   In this episode, we explore Ferna...

Fred Reichheld, inventor of the Net Promoter Score ® (NPS), sees customers recommendations as an act of love. Recommendations are a chance to provide an experience to someone they care about.   Reichheld's new book, Winning on Purpose: The Unbeatable Strategy of Loving Customers , shows tracking the actual referrals is the next level, what Reichheld describes as the "gold" in the business—and the...

I love when listeners write in with their business problems. I don't love that they have problems, but I love that they share them with us so we can all work through them together. In our latest submission for our "I'm in a Pickle" feature of the podcast, Janet explains that even though their customer comments are overwhelmingly positive, their Net Promoter Score ® (NPS) is not where they need it...

I am happy to announce that I am getting my first electric guitar. Many of you know that also means I am buying my first amplifier, too. The one I have my eye on is Fender's, not because I know anything about amplifiers and their performance, but because I like how it looks like it came straight out of the 1960s.   Nostalgia is an important part of my amplifier purchase. When I see the old-fashion...

One of our listeners, Jeanne-Claude, has a problem. He sells a complex product and despite the fact that they have the best one in the industry, the competition is outselling them.   I can relate. I sold a complicated product when I was in corporate life, and it was always a highly competitive field. It can be challenging to communicate why you are the best when you have a complex offering and you...

Scarcity is something are more used to these days, particularly in light of the supply chain problems we see. Scarcity is something we feel when we are doing thing we have enough of what we need. If we don't fix the problems at the ports, and the related problem of driver shortages to bring things in from the ports, we might see quite a few empty shelves this holiday season.   Not that empty store...

The 5 Rules to Dramatically Improve The Way you Deal with Customer Complaints A lot of the behavioral sciences can feel intimidating. However, it doesn't have to be. The Five Rules Podcast Series is our attempt at giving you an easy entry point into the complex and messy world of Behavioral Science. Does your organization like to pretend that complaints never happen? When they do happen, does the...

Rachel has a problem. Her boss can't see the need to change. She is frustrated and doesn't know what to do. Lucky for her, she listens to our podcast and took advantage of our "Help! I'm in a Pickle!" segment for our advice on what to do.   In this episode, we explore what Rachel, or anyone who champions Customer Experience but doesn't have the support they need from above, can do to convince her...

Back in 1994, Steve Jobs introduced a concept at an Apple conference: that the design of their products should begin at the desired Customer Experience and work backward from there .   Not long after that, Joe Pine co-authored a book called The Experience Economy , that changed the way at looked at the future of business.   In 2002, I began my global Customer Experience consultancy, Beyond Philoso...

Total agreement is overrated. Disagreements are good for us. They challenge the status quo and push the standards for improvement. After all, if you only talk to people who agree with you, how would you know when you are wrong? In this episode, I debate with Customer Experience critic Alex Mead , Chief Customer Service Experience Officer, about how we Customer Experience influencers are doing ever...

Great business insights with a touch of humor, all put over in a clear, easy-to-understand way.   Each week we discuss how you can gain and retain more customers and solve business problems. We look at the theory of how and why Customers make decisions and then break this down into practical actions you can take. Here is one review which we think sums up the show. "The dynamics between the hosts o...

Do you remember Blockbuster, Circuit City, or Kodak? I ask because these brands are not around anymore. They were once the leaders in their field, the only game in town in some cases, but now they are gone. They disappeared because they didn't respond to changes in the marketplace with new ideas. It isn't unusual for an organization to be set in its ways. Human beings are also reluctant to change...

A lot of the behavioral sciences can feel intimidating. However, it doesn't have to be. The Five Rules Podcast Series is our attempt at giving you an easy entry point into the complex and messy world of Behavioral Science. If I had a more efficient family and less expensive friends than you have now, would you like to trade? I can guarantee they will save you time and money.   My guess is probably...

We all love to keep what is ours. As soon as we have possession of something, it becomes part of our "endowment," a fancy word for "our stuff." Psychologists call this the Endowment Effect, and it explains how we value things that we have, even if we got them for free. However, we also hate losing our stuff, even more that we enjoy getting new stuff. Psychologists call this Loss Aversion, and it i...

Sometimes customers don't come back. The two biggest reasons that customers do not come back are apathy and rudeness. With either behavior on your side of the experience, you will lose customers' business. So how do you get them to say, "I'll be back?"   Our guest Shep Hyken, author, speaker, and thought leader for the Customer Experience movement joins us to answer that question with material fro...

You probably didn't mean to do it. You were just trying to market the latest brand effort to your new and existing customer base. You were doing your job; getting the message out. Unfortunately, your marketing inadvertently damaged your customer focus.   However, marketing isn't the only area to blame for the problem. How you segment customers also contributes to this damage, as well as how well y...

If you are like most companies, you probably think that you put the customer at the center of everything you do. But do you? There are some critical things that the most customer centric companies do differently than the average company. It requires a mindset that understands the essential nature of it and then a consistent approach to applying it in all the areas of the company, from how you recr...